1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of power measurement. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for monitoring electrical power.
2. The Relevant Technology
Electricity has become an indispensable part of people's lives and electricity is used in many aspects of life. Homes, business, factories, and communities all use varying amounts of electricity. In practical terms, all of the devices, machines, motors, air conditioning equipment, fans, manufacturing equipment, other electrically powered industrial equipment, etc., that need electricity to operate can be viewed as some type of load.
While the electricity delivered to a particular entity is usually measured by the power company for various purposes including billing purposes, monitoring the electrical power consumption of an individual load is not usually performed by the power company. In fact, monitoring the power consumption of an individual load is often not cost effective to the owner of the load. This may be due to the fact that the capital and installation cost of a monitoring device such as a power meter is too high relative to the amount of power being consumed by the load.
Although the cost of the power being consumed by the load may not justify the installation of a power meter, the costs associated with the failure of the load may be many times greater. This means that after experiencing a failure, many industrial customers “wish” they would have had monitoring equipment installed even though the costs were not initially justifiable. Possible electrical failures include those due to voltage sag, motor insulation breakdown, etc.
Many impending failures can be detected if appropriate monitoring equipment is present. If the power is being monitored, then appropriate actions can be taken when certain situations occur. This may prevent the failure of a load or may reduce the down time of the load. As previously indicated, however, power monitoring equipment is often not installed because of the associated cost. Much of the cost of installing a monitoring device such as a power meter may be due to the costs of wiring voltage, current and communications connections.
In addition to the costs associated with a power meter, power meters are also not used because they are difficult to install and use. For example, conductors must often be temporarily disconnected from the load and/or de-energized in the process of installing the monitoring device. In other words, the installation of the monitoring device results in down time for the load. The removal of the monitoring device may also require the conductors to be temporarily disconnected from the load and/or de-energized. In addition, the time required to both install/remove the power meter from a particular load makes it difficult to use for different loads. In other words, each load experiences down time when this type of power meter is being used.